If You Want to Know Why Markets Crash and Dalmatians Have Spots, Then
Ask a Computer

Roger Highfield, Esquire (UK) (February 1994) 20.

Stephen Wolfram has an intimidating CV. He published his first paper
on particle physics while at Eton, studied for a year at Oxford (even final
year lectures were "all too horrible", he declared), and received
a doctorate at the California Institute of Technology, aged 20. Following
a sojourn in Einstein's final intellectual resting place—the Institute
for Advanced Study, Princeton—he was, at 27, offered a professorship,
funding and a specially created department at the University of Illinois
to pursue his interest in complexity—the trendy effort to understand
the complicated features of the world about us, from the spots on a leopard
to a crash in the stock exchange.

To speed his mathematical research, Wolfram developed Mathematica,
a revolutionary computer program. He set up Wolfram
Research in 1987 to market the software and since then, his company
has blossomed into a multi-million dollar enterprise that has enabled one
million researchers in over 90 countries to use Mathematica. The
software can express calculations in a flexible computer programming language
so they can be solved, manipulated, displayed as a graph and even played
over a loudspeaker.

Stephen Wolfram's work on complexity continues unabated and has led
him to believe that the effort to reduce the workings of the cosmos to
a mathematical "Theory of Everything"—one pursued by eminent scientists
such as Stephen Hawking and Einstein—may be fundamentally flawed.

Contemporary attempts to write science's Book of Genesis focus on uniting
the four known fundamental forces into one all-encompassing mathematical
theory, combining the inner space of sub-atomic particles with the outer
space of the cosmos. But Wolfram believes that if he is successful in his
bid to use computers to provide an ultimate explanation of everything under
and beyond the stars, mathematics will soon become little more than an
aesthetic pursuit akin to art.

Mathematica has convinced Wolfram why the traditional mathematical
approach has been brilliant at describing atoms or galaxies, but a failure
when it comes to the messy bits in between. "There are lots of obvious
features of the natural world that traditional science has done a crummy
job of explaining," Wolfram maintains.

The use of mathematical equations to describe the behaviour of the real
world breaks down in the simplest circumstances—for instance, it is impossible
to solve the equations that describe how two planets orbit the sun or the
turbulent flow of a liquid. But planetary motions can be reproduced by
running the laws of gravity in a computer and the collective flow of trillions
of water molecules can be mimicked if a computer applies a few basic rules
to myriad sample units.

The latter, dubbed "cellular automata", have been studied
for more than half a century, but in 1982, Wolfram rekindled interest (ruffling
the feathers of established practitioners in the field) by classifying
automata into various menageries and using automata to simulate complex
phenomena, ranging from the growth of snowflakes and patterns on molluscs.
"What I am trying to do is to rebuild science on such simple computer
programs, rather than use traditional mathematics," says Wolfram.

Too bad that Wolfram has no plans to return to Britain. But not only
is the US awash with opportunities in terms of lectureships and dollars,
Wolfram, now aged 33, would feel out of place in Britain's scientific establishment,
which is dominated by old men.

Go to a Royal Society soirèe and you will be struck by the numbers of
grey beards, perhaps even more by the speed with which they clear the place
of wine and canapès. Clearly, no one is earning very much, and this is
the crème de la crème of British science, which includes a smattering of
Nobel laureates.

The best science is done by the young. When Einstein reached the peak
of his powers, he was a well-built, arrogant 26-year-old, not the buffoon
who stuck his tongue out at the cameras. There are plenty more Wolframs
out there in British universities. Until the country offers sufficient
funding, prospects and prestige, we risk losing them too.